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language.

That shaqra, that blonde. Help me, Allah, she can indeed speak the language.

Such were the thoughts that drove Samir Hasan, cabdriver, to follow the pair of women into the elevator, even while his cab was idling at the curb. Making sure to turn around and face the elevator door as soon as he entered it, he heard the pale-haired woman ask someone to push the button for the top floor where the Windows on the World restaurant was located. When she awkwardly interjected the word mishmish into some silly conversation about fashion, the cabdriver decided to get out the next time the elevator doors opened and take another one back down to the lobby.

Hardly able to disguise his agitation, Hasan hurried back to his two-way radio to broadcast his panic to a compatriot he only knew as Fa’ud, the same man who had, while assuming the cabbie was alone, radioed a grocery list of highly secret code words.

“Ladhibhah teena is not enough. How tall is she? How is she dressed? Where is she at this moment?” Fa’ud demanded.

“Why are you asking this? I am telling you the words are no good now. The shaqra heard them but she doesn’t know why we are using them. We must change them.”

“It’s too late. Allah save us. You must take care of her.”

“You cannot be saying. . .”

Chapter 12

New York City, December 23, 2000

Liz decided to lose no time in getting back to Boston. But there was something she wanted to accomplish before leaving the city.

Hiring a cab from the garage, she got in the vehicle and opened her envelope containing Ellen’s photos. Squinting to read the print on the shopping bags held by Ellen and Nadia in the photo taken at the New York Public Library, she asked the driver to take her to Florissa’s Gift Emporium on 44th Street.

“Got a street number?” the cabbie asked.

“Sorry, no.”

“East or west?” he asked.

“Not sure.”

“Forty-fourth is one-way running west. Unless you hit it lucky, this’ll cost ya.”

“Let’s start near the New York Public Library and take our chances.”

“You’re the boss.”

Liz was in luck. The gift shop was just two blocks west of the library. She paid the cab and entered a shop that exuded a sickeningly sweet smell of potpourri pillows and scented soaps. It hardly seemed the sort of place a woman like Ellen would find attractive. Nor did it look like the kind of shop a tourist would favor. Even the generous stock of crystal and china sold here was largely imported from Ireland and the British Isles, making it an unlikely choice for anyone wishing to bring home something made in America. There wasn’t even a rack of postcards in the place.

Liz showed her photo of Ellen and Nadia to three clerks, but none would admit to recognizing the shoppers. Two volunteered that they’d worked on the days Ellen and Nadia spent in the city, but they said another clerk, who was presently taking a few days off for Christmas, had also worked afternoons during that time. Not surprisingly, they refused to give contact information for their colleague.

Disappointed, Liz took a business card and gave the shop girls one of her own. After leaving the shop, she hailed another cab. It was no use following up on the other shopping bag in the photo. It would be an impossible job to interview countless clerks in the massive department store, Saks Fifth Avenue. So Liz swung by Janice’s apartment. After making apologies for cutting her visit short, she picked up her travel bag, hailed another cab, and paid a pretty penny to be driven to LaGuardia Airport. She had to wait for two fully booked flights of holiday travelers to take off before she finally got a shuttle to her city. But since the shuttle flights took off every half hour and the flight was only thirty-eight minutes long, Liz made her way to Boston in time to report her story.

When she told Dermott about the cabbie’s disappearance, the city editor gave her twelve inches and the order, “Deliver the new stuff and then recap. Be sure to pull the heartstrings about the kid. Doesn’t look like Mom’s coming home anytime soon.”

On her ATEX keyboard, Liz began to hammer out her article. Then, unzipping the coconut on her desk, Liz took out a chocolate. Voted “Most Unusual Freebie of the Year” by the editorial assistants, the oddball item had been sent to her some months ago by the Fijian Tourism Board on the mistaken assumption that “Misses Higgins” was a travel editor. Originally filled with a bar of coconut soap, a vial of coconut oil, and a press release about a Fijian spa, the hollowed-out shell with a red zipper running around it now served as a quirky stash for sweets.

Thanks to editorial assistant E.A. Tenley, the bizarre candy container also served as a paperweight for two articles from that day’s papers. Liz picked them up. One was an article by Nancy Knight, headed: “Fingerprints Inconclusive in Missing Mother Case.” The headline said it all, but nevertheless, the broadsheet World gave Knight plenty of space in which to elaborate.

“Newton Police reported yesterday that missing Newton librarian Ellen Johansson’s kitchen was remarkably free of fingerprint evidence,” Knight wrote. “‘The dearth of fingerprint evidence suggests that an attempt was made to wipe down surfaces,’ said Newton police chief Anthony Warner, referring to the Fenwick Street home from which Johansson, 34, went missing five days ago.”

In contrast to Knight’s luxuriously long rehash, Dick Manning’s shorter Banner piece telegraphed the essentials—and the Page-Five article offered a nugget of new information:

WIPE-OUT

By Dick Manning

Newton police chief Anthony Warner fingered what he called ‘a dearth of fingerprint evidence’ as stalling the wrap-up of a chilling pre-Christmas crime that has tony Newton suburbanites shivering.

Fingerprint evidence was just one thing that went missing five days ago, when well-heeled Newton mom Ellen Johansson, 34, made an unexplained exit from the home she shared with her husband, Erik Johansson, 37, and the couple’s eight-year-old daughter, Veronica. The couple’s new Honda Civic was gone, too, when the strawberry-blond third-grader came home from school to a kitchen stocked with bloodied Christmas- cookie–making ingredients.

Warner said he saw evidence of a “wipe down” of the Johanssons’ top-of-the-line marble countertops. But the police chief could only speculate about why the cleanup job was left unfinished.

“It looks like someone was interrupted,” Warner told the Banner. “It’s like somebody wiped the place down before sprinkling blood on those ingredients. The only fingerprints we found in the countertop area were on the dinky dishes that held the ingredients, and those prints belong to Mrs. Johansson,” the chief added.

“The only unaccounted-for fingerprints we found were on an empty teacup in the kitchen sink,” Warner said. Other nonfamily fingerprints found on the scene belong to a handyman, Floyd Margate, 43, of Everett, who repaired the disposal last week, and the couple’s babysitter, Laura Winters, 26, of Brighton.

At the time of this reporting, police had not yet verified the whereabouts of Margate and Winters on Dec 18, the day Ellen Johansson went missing. But the Banner learned Margate was on another job in Everett throughout that day. And Winters was at work at the Children’s Enrichment Aftercare Program and later at the Johansson home on the day in question. The daycare provider stayed to help with Veronica until the child’s grandmother, Olga Swenson, 69, returned from her hairdresser’s appointment on Boston’s posh Newbury Street and was contacted to take the child to her Wellesley home.